The Meal: Fine dining à la Stephen Fry

The Buttery is very proper indeed and the food just so, but you dont always want to eat somewhere that feels like a party of polite strangers

When he was prime minister, Harold Macmillan was asked what he feared most as a politician. “Events, dear boy, events,” Macmillan replied, betraying a certain uppercrust detachment from the fact that his interlocutor was actually an 18st woman named Maureen.

Nonetheless the point stands: fortune delights in the sneaky ambush — in placing the puddle of engine oil on the darkened staircase or, for those who know their Shakespeare, the spider at the bottom of the tankard. One can only marvel at the myriad and ingenious ways fate devises to thwart one (recently, for example, fate has afflicted one with the irritating habit of referring to oneself by means of the impersonal pronoun).

The point about events and their unpredictability applies as much to restaurants as it does to politics. Who knows what woes the customers may be dragging in with them through the doors? Mein hosts might have starched the